The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations by Mark Letteney (review)

Reviewed by: The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations by Mark Letteney Todd S. Berzon Mark Letteney The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023 Pp. xvi + 290. 110. 00 and Open Access. In the opening pages of The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, Mark Letteney explains his project with an appeal to two distinct if related metaphors. In the first, he describes his book as an intellectual history of late antiquity centered around a time when "a novel form of argumentation escaped from the lab" (4). In the wake of Nicaea, Christians, he maintains, forged modes of argumentation within their scholarly enclaves that were nothing short of revolutionary: "Nicene Christians, ascending positions of power, changed the way that an entire scholastic culture approached the creation, verification, and dissemination of facts" (5). This cultural apparatus was, in his second image (borrowed from Carlo Ginzburg), a cage. In this formulation, culture operates a set of precedents and procedures that elaborates the legitimate terms of knowledge production. Letteney's monograph investigates how this cage came to look the way it did, how these scholarly impulses and precedents emerged within the cage and eventually altered the bars that held it together. Part One: New Readers charts a broad narrative of the development of Christian scholastic methodology. Chapter Two begins by explaining the practices that pre-Nicene Christians used to adduce and authorize truth claims. Letteney tours the methods of truth production used by Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the Gospel of Truth, explaining how this quintet devised structures of knowledge founded on institutional, philosophical, exegetical, doctrinal, and revelatory precepts. In Chapter Three, Letteney turns his attention to the Council of Nicaea as the watershed moment in the history of late antique scholastic culture. The chapter is focused on Athanasius's construction of an orthodox patrimony. This intellectual patrimony, though informed by and in conversation with scripture, ultimately came to stand on its own terms. Athanasius's efforts signaled the beginnings of an era of scholastic engagement defined by the formation and End Page 303 prominence of a tripartite style of argumentation: aggregation, distillation, and presentation. The final chapter of Part One explores how these practices became the dominant scholastic method of the Theodosian age. Through a variety of sources—from Macrobius's Saturnalia to the Theodosian Code—Letteney charts the expansive reach of aggregation, distillation, and promulgation. Ultimately, he contends, this method supplied "the reader with the opportunity to grasp universal knowledge" (127). Part Two: New Texts, shifts the perspective from methodological tellings to material showings. It begins in Chapter Five with the codex. Letteney argues that Christians of the Theodosian age collapsed the distinction between codex and code. The presentation of knowledge in the codex form and the authorization of that knowledge became one and the same. In Christian culture, the codex became a prestige object. Chapter Six turns to works by Ambrose, Hilary, and Jerome and the Theodosian Code to demonstrate what he calls "the problem of discernment": how scholars differentiated between true and false sources within the aggregative method. Alongside discursive content, Letteney introduces manuscript evidence to illustrate how scribes themselves practiced discernment with textual and paratextual cues. He shows us how Nicene Christian methods came to color the manuscript page itself. Chapter Seven picks up this thread with an extended analysis of the ideological and technological Christianization of manuscripts of non-Christian material. Letteney discusses the tools, including supralineate contractions, abbreviations, and staurograms, by which scribes grafted Christianity (wittingly and not) onto texts. The final chapter of the book examines the interpretive strategies that emerged at the conjunction of these methods and forms. It considers the Law of Citations (C. Th. 1. 4. 3), Jerome's biblical exegesis and translation, the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, and the Palestinian Talmud to show how readers found truth amid vast quantities of aggregated knowledge. Letteney contends that the rise of this documentary culture produced an intense suspicion of the accuracy and integrity of those very same documents. After a brief conclusion, he offers a case study (functionally Chapter Nine) in which he examines anew the. . .